2005, Set two

• Let Us Consider Time, Tree Riesener
• Thinking About It, Tree Riesener

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• Editor's Comments

t-r-e-e-@treeriesener.com.
http://www.treeriesener.com

Let Us Consider Time

by Tree Riesener

For this meditation, I will look up and down early paleozoic. What was going on
in those blank spaces on the cladogram, all those creatures? The world made mad?

Segue to vox humana, tacticity, molestia, machination; comfortable words:
your tests are negative, I think we'll have rain, the circle has not yet been broken.

Blue and silver motorcycle wrapped in wind, open hospital gown, long white hair
whipping in sustaining speed or a child tricycling alone down the cool corridor?

Angels mutable as residents of a sex-change clinic in Colorado watch late-night
television, lapping time pooled as ice cream melting, dripping off a silver spoon.

Irridescent film over black and white television topped with golden horses, bellies
full of clock; hollowish farmhouses where water is pumped for the icy common cup.

The drinking gourd'll be out of the clouds by time to leave, but I may be wrong; you
can't get across the wall and sojourn in occupied lands by ignoring the sirens' sirens.

Uncertain prophets, nuns getting a leg over... read the rules constellations imply;
you'll hear the door when they come for you, so shinny up the tallest tree, deny, defy.

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Thinking About It

by Tree Riesener

I hang dead fairies on cup-hooks, drown brownies like kittens in a bag made of string,
hire banshees for kitchen gods. You are coming to my house--know these things.

Be gentle with the lambs, hide the death sword until the last minute. Jesus, you're lucky
they didn't break off your finger to munch on like Hansel, the witch's plaything.

I will join you on your deathbed, not sit upright leafing through a magazine.
Lying with you, turn, hold up my hand, wonder at the translucency death brings.

In the ossuary, dead body parts lie abandoned in flat death, consorting in an
egalitarian way, under grave Latin inscriptions in the corridor's gloom, nurslings.

Your son has been found, not dead after all, with amnesia, living as an indigenous
person with his wife and children in Brazil, on a plantation as a day labor hireling.

Scarey, time melting all over the place, clocks sodden as pancakes, dead batteries.
I will invent new light to take your photograph when you leap to meet death's sting.

Does the glass miss its wine after the drinking, the womb its child? The deathbed
photo some rich whole? After grinding, the tree its thrust into sky's level evening?

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Editor's Comments

Time--source of endless fascination and confusion. Tree's first sher evokes images of geological time, the backward calendars that recede from our present into the distance. The rest of the ghazal deals with more personal time--medical time, time of birth, of illness and death. Time that consumes us as we flee it. Television-top horses, with "bellies / full of clock," elicit a cascade of memories, those inner experiences that pretend to do with time past (passing, gone).

"Thinking About It"

You say you need more time? Here it is, in this ghazal, more time to meditate on death, meet death with an open shutter, lens tuned to infinity. Death, life, love all entwine, leaving traces like the phantom branches of the tree in the last line of this ghazal. Think about it.

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